27.2 Managing a professional service

Understanding the nature of the service

It has been pointed out many times that professional services produce intangible outputs or products. In consulting, the product is the advice given to the client. Alternatively, if implementation is included, one could say that the final product is the change that occurs and the improvements achieved in the client organization thanks to the consultant’s intervention.

Such a product is difficult to define, measure and evaluate. The client’s view of the product and its real value may be quite different from the consultant’s. In marketing his or her services, what the consultant is selling is essentially a promise – of help that will satisfy the client’s needs. To use Theodore Levitt’s words, clients cannot “see, touch, smell, taste or test” the product before deciding to purchase it.3 They have to look for surrogates in assessing whether the consultant is likely to deliver what has been promised.

This explains the crucial role of self-assessment, self-discipline and an ethical approach in marketing and delivering the consulting service. Often the consultant will be the only person able to judge what services to offer in general, and what he or she can promise and actually deliver to a particular client.

There are ways of reducing uncertainty by increasing product tangibility. The client can be given a manual describing in detail how the business will be diagnosed, what data will be examined, comparisons made, ratios produced and suggestions developed. Or the consultant may be offering a system or a procedure, which will be delivered as such, in its standard form, or with adaptations and supplements. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, service and product commodification has progressed in consulting. Any large consultancy has some tangible standard products to offer and some small firms have been completely built around one or two proprietary systems. Yet the basic issue remains the same. Every client organization is unique and there is no certainty that even an excellent standardized system will be effective in every client’s environment. Even the largest consultancies are not in the mass production and “ready-to- wear” business but in “tailor-made” services and products.

Determining what services to standardize is a key strategic decision. There are consultants who have spoilt their reputation by selling standard packages to clients who needed an individualized approach. On the other hand, a standard system or methodology applied flexibly and with imagination, and in combination with and in support of an individualized approach where appropriate, can increase the quality of the service and reduce the costs both to the consultant and to the client.